THE WHALE--FIGHTING BULLS, ETC.
As the reader may, perhaps, have been asking a few questions about the
whale in his own mind, I shall try to answer them, by telling a few
things concerning that creature which, I think, are worth knowing.
In the first place, the whale is not a fish! I have applied that name
to it, no doubt, because it is the custom to do so; but there are great
differences between the whales and the fishes. The mere fact that the
whale lives in water is not sufficient to prove it to be a fish. The
frog lives very much in water--he is born in the water, and, when very
young, he lives in it altogether--would die, in fact, if he were taken
out of it; yet a frog is not a fish.
The following are some of the differences existing between a whale and
a fish:--The whale is a warm-blooded animal; the fish is cold-blooded.
The whale brings forth its young alive; while most fishes lay eggs or
spawn. Moreover, the fish lives entirely under water, but the whale
cannot do so. He breathes air through enormous lungs, not gills. If
you were to hold a whale's head under water for much longer than an
hour, it would certainly be drowned; and this is the reason why it
comes so frequently to the surface of the sea to take breath. Whales
seldom stay more than an hour under water, and when they come up to
breathe, they discharge the last breath they took through their
nostrils or blowholes, mixed with large quantities of water which they
have taken in while feeding. But the most remarkable point of
difference between the whale and fishes of all kinds is, that it
suckles its young.
The calf of one kind of whale is about fourteen feet long when it is
born, and it weighs about a ton. The cow-whale usually brings forth
only one calf at a time, and the manner in which she behaves to her
gigantic baby shows that she is affected by feelings of anxiety and
affection such as are never seen in fishes, which heartless creatures
forsake their eggs when they are laid, and I am pretty sure they would
not know their own children if they happened to meet with them.
The whale, on the contrary, takes care of her little one, gives it
suck, and sports playfully with it in the waves; its enormous heart
throbbing all the while, no doubt, with satisfaction.
I have heard of a whale which was once driven into shoal water with its
calf and nearly stranded. The huge dam seemed to become anxious for
the safety of her child, for she was seen to swim eagerly round it,
embrace it with her fins, and roll it over in the waves, trying to make
it follow her into deep water. But the calf was obstinate; it would
not go, and the result was that the boat of a whaler pulled up and
harpooned it. The poor little whale darted away like lightning on
receiving the terrible iron, and ran out a hundred fathoms of line; but
it was soon overhauled and killed. All this time the dam kept close to
the side of its calf, and not until a harpoon was plunged into her own
side would she move away. Two boats were after her. With a single rap
of her tail she cut one of the boats in two, and then darted off. But
in a short time she turned and came back. Her feelings of anxiety had
returned, no doubt, after the first sting of pain was over, and she
died at last close to the side of her young one.
There are various kinds of whales, but the two sorts that are most
sought after are the common whale of the Greenland Seas, which is
called the "right whale", and the sperm whale of the South Sea. Both
kinds are found in the south; but the sperm whale never goes to the
North Seas. Both kinds grow to an enormous size--sometimes to seventy
feet in length, but there is considerable difference in their
appearance, especially about the head. In a former chapter I have
partly described the head of a _right_ whale, which has whalebone
instead of teeth, with its blowholes on the back of the head. The
sperm whale has large white teeth in its lower jaw and none at all in
the upper. It has only one blowhole, and that a little one, much
farther forward on its head, so that sailors can tell, at a great
distance, what kind of whales they see simply by their manner of
spouting.
The most remarkable feature about the sperm whale is the bluntness of
its clumsy head, which looks somewhat like a big log with the end sawn
square off, and this head is about one-third of its entire body.
The sperm whale feeds differently from the right whale. He seizes his
prey with his powerful teeth, and lives, to a great extent, on large
cuttle-fish. Some of them have been seen to vomit lumps of these
cuttle-fish as long as a whale-boat. He is much fiercer, too, than the
right whale, which almost always takes to flight when struck, but the
sperm whale will sometimes turn on its foes and smash their boat with a
blow of his blunt head or tail.
Fighting-whales, as they are called, are not uncommon. These are
generally old bulls, which have become wise from experience, and give
the whalers great trouble--sometimes carrying away several harpoons and
lines. The lower jaw of one old bull of this kind was found to be
sixteen feet long, and it had forty-eight teeth, some of them a foot
long. A number of scars about his head showed that this fellow had
been in the wars. When two bull-whales take to fighting, their great
effort is to catch each other by the lower jaw, and, when locked
together, they struggle with a degree of fury that cannot be described.
It is not often that the sperm whale actually attacks a ship; but there
are a few cases of this kind which cannot be doubted. The following
story is certainly true; and while it shows how powerful a creature the
whale is, it also shows what terrible risk and sufferings the whaleman
has frequently to encounter.
In the month of August, 1819, the American whaleship _Essex_ sailed
from Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean. She was commanded by Captain
Pollard. Late in the autumn of the same year, when in latitude 40
degrees of the South Pacific, a shoal, or "school", of sperm whales was
discovered, and three boats were immediately lowered and sent in
pursuit. The mate's boat was struck by one of the fish during the
chase, and it was found necessary to return to the ship to repair
damages.
While the men were employed at this, an enormous whale suddenly rose
quite close to the ship. He was going at nearly the same rate with the
ship--about three miles an hour; and the men, who were good judges of
the size of whales, thought that it could not have been less than
eighty-five feet long. All at once he ran against the ship, striking
her bows, and causing her to tremble like a leaf. The whale
immediately dived and passed under the ship, and grazed her keel in
doing so. This evidently hurt his back, for he suddenly rose to the
surface about fifty yards off, and commenced lashing the sea with his
tail and fins as if suffering great agony. It was truly an awful sight
to behold that great monster lashing the sea into foam at so short a
distance.
In a short time he seemed to recover, and started off at great speed to
windward. Meanwhile the men discovered that the blow received by the
ship had done her so much damage, that she began to fill and settle
down at the bows; so they rigged the pumps as quickly as possible.
While working them one of the men cried out:
"God have mercy! he comes again!"
This was too true. The whale had turned, and was now bearing down on
them at full speed, leaving a white track of foam behind him. Rushing
at the ship like a battering-ram, he hit her fair on the weather bow
and stove it in, after which he dived and disappeared. The horrified
men took to their boats at once, and in _ten minutes_ the ship went
down.
The condition of the men thus left in three open boats far out upon the
sea, without provisions or shelter, was terrible indeed. Some of them
perished, and the rest, after suffering the severest hardships, reached
a low island called Ducies on the 20th of December. It was a mere
sand-bank, which supplied them only with water and sea-fowl. Still
even this was a mercy, for which they had reason to thank God; for in
cases of this kind one of the evils that seamen have most cause to
dread is the want of water.
Three of the men resolved to remain on this sand-bank, for dreary and
uninhabited though it was, they preferred to take their chance of being
picked up by a passing ship rather than run the risks of crossing the
wide ocean in open boats, so their companions bade them a sorrowful
farewell, and left them. But this island is far out of the usual track
of ships. The poor fellows have never since been heard of.
It was the 27th of December when the three boats left the sand-bank
with the remainder of the men, and began a voyage of two thousand
miles, towards the island of Juan Fernandez. The mate's boat was
picked up, about three months after, by the ship _Indian_ of London,
with only three living men in it. About the same time the captain's
boat was discovered, by the _Dauphin_ of Nantucket, with only two men
living; and these unhappy beings had only sustained life by feeding on
the flesh of their dead comrades. The third boat must have been lost,
for it was never heard of; and out of the whole crew of twenty men,
only five returned home to tell their eventful story.
Before resuming the thread of my narrative, I must not omit to mention,
that in the head of the sperm whale there is a large cavity or hole
called the "case", which contains pure oil that does not require to be
melted, but can be baled at once into casks and stowed away. This is
the valuable spermaceti from which the finest candles are made. One
whale will sometimes yield fifteen barrels of spermaceti oil from the
"case" of its head. A large fish will produce from eighty to a hundred
barrels of oil altogether, sometimes much more; and when whalemen
converse with each other about the size of whales, they speak of
"eighty-barrel fish", and so on.
Although I have written much about the fighting powers of the sperm
whale, it must not be supposed that whales are by nature fond of
fighting. On the contrary, the "right" whale is a timid creature, and
never shows fight except in defence of its young. And the sperm whale
generally takes to flight when pursued. In fact, most of the accidents
that happen to whalemen occur when the wounded monster is lashing the
water in blind terror and agony.
The whale has three bitter enemies, much smaller, but much bolder than
himself, and of these he is terribly afraid. They are: the swordfish,
the thrasher, and the killer. The first of these, the sword-fish, has
a strong straight horn or sword projecting from his snout, with which
he boldly attacks and pierces the whale. The thrasher is a strong
fish, twenty feet long, and of great weight. Its method of attack is
to leap out of the water on the whale's back, and deal it a tremendous
blow with its powerful tail.
The sword-fish and thrasher sometimes act together in the attack; the
first stabbing him below, and the second belabouring him above, while
the whale, unable, or too frightened to fight, rushes through the
water, and even leaps its whole gigantic length into the air in its
endeavours to escape. When a whale thus leaps his whole length out of
the water, the sailors say he "breaches", and breaching is a common
practice. They seem to do it often for amusement as well as from
terror.
But the most deadly of the three enemies is the killer. This is itself
a kind of small whale, but it is wonderfully strong, swift, and bold.
When one of the killers gets into the middle of a school of whales, the
frightened creatures are seen flying in all directions. His mode of
attack is to seize his big enemy by the jaw, and hold on until he is
exhausted and dies.